The Energy Department contractor at the West Valley Demonstration Project near Buffalo, N.Y., recently finished shipping the last of the site’s legacy low-level radioactive waste for disposal.
Contractor CH2M HILL BWXT West Valley (CHBWV) finished the shipments on Sept. 6, a spokesman said by email. Legacy waste in this context means material predating the 2011 start of the CHBWV cleanup contract at West Valley.
About 86 percent of the waste had been shipped by the end of 2017, according to an annual site environmental report published on Sept. 10. That encompassed 45 shipments over the year.
The contractor is responsible for disposing of industrial, hazardous, mixed hazardous, and low-level waste from West Valley. The LLRW was sent to disposal facilities such as EnergySolutions in Utah and the Waste Control Specialists site in Texas, the spokesman said.
The legacy material amounted to about 180,000 cubic feet or 151 shipments over time.
West Valley is state-owned and covers about 200 acres of the 3,300-acre Western New York Nuclear Service Center. Between 1962 and 1972 the West Valley site was home to the Nuclear Fuel Services reprocessing plant.
The BWXT-CH2M team has a $542.3 million contract covering cleanup from August 2011 through March 2020. The contractor’s work includes deactivating and tearing down highly radioactive facilities, and disposing of their components.
